![]() ![]() ![]() One day shortly after anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, when their secondhand car fails to start, they take informal minibuses to church and nearly get attacked by an angry Zulu driver, emphasizing the danger and intergroup tension that continues to structure black South Africans’ everyday lives in the wake of apartheid. He shows how Christianity offers his mother a source of moral strength and discipline, which she seeks to pass onto her children. Every Sunday, his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, takes him and his baby brother, Andrew, to three churches: an integrated megachurch that seeks “to make Jesus cool,” an austere white church whose pastor focuses on interpreting passages from the Bible, and an informal outdoor black church whose congregants spend hours praying for Jesus to alleviate their suffering. In the first chapter, he focuses on the role of religion in his childhood. The first part of Born a Crime (Chapters 1-8) offers a portrait of Noah’s family under the apartheid regime. Each chapter also begins with a short preface, generally about the social and historical context behind the events Noah recounts. While the 18 chapters of Born a Crime generally trace Noah’s childhood from his birth to the beginning of his comedy career after high school, they consist of vignettes rather than a linear story. Born in 1984 to a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss expatriate father, Noah is not merely an anomaly in apartheid South Africa his existence is actually illegal because the regime outlawed relationships between people of different races. ![]() In his 2016 memoir Born a Crime, comedian Trevor Noah recounts his childhood in South Africa under the apartheid government and the first few years of democratic rule by the nation’s black majority. ![]()
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